In the Trees

Erik Olson, “Treehouse,” 2018

oil, spray paint, oil stick and paper on canvas, 71” x 55”

There’s something invigorating about Erik Olson’s rough-hewn artistry. He’s known for his portraits, faces jagged and disintegrating in gooey slashes of colour. But his latest body of work, one of his self-described tangents, focuses on trees. The richest pieces in his show at Calgary’s VivianeArt until April 14 wed subject – including unabashedly jerry-built tree houses – with what might be called a faux-naïf style, except that it feels too genuine. The results are exuberant, childlike and intriguing.

Yet, simultaneously, the intellect prickles, sensing ways to read the work as a commentary on the current state of the world, particularly the increasingly unstable relationship between nature’s complex ecological systems and humanity’s ever-more fraught efforts to control and shape them. Treehouse, for instance, features pallet-like forms in a tree, but also squares that resemble painted banners, some figurative, some abstract, all equally casual. The picture plane is oddly flat, the forms as jumbled and deconstructed as one of Picasso’s women, and the colours an arresting array of vibrancy and mud.

Erik Olson, “In the Trees,” 2018, installation view at VivianeArt

The smaller paintings, some more developed, others sketchier (though Calgary-born Olson considers all 18 to be finished works) create a peculiar sense of looking into the artist's brain as he unfolds and tests ideas. In the Trees, which also includes four larger paintings and three sculptures, is not always easy on the eyes. But the work, more than anything, I think, is about play. Or, as Olson sums it up: “I try to keep it fresh and follow things I’m interested in.”

The story behind the work, given Olson’s willingness to follow serendipity and listen to his intuition, is fascinating. It began, he explains, when he was at an artist residency along Italy's Ligurian coast, where he became intrigued by the region's oak trees. They reminded him of a novel he’d read some time before, The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino. Written in 1957, it’s a whimsical account of a boy from a noble family who climbs a tree and spends the rest of his life in an arboreal realm. When Olson discovered that Calvino had grown up nearby, he thought he’d found a direction for a new body of work, and began drawing trees and thinking more deeply about the theme.

Erik Olson, “Starry Night,” 2018

Erik Olson, “Moonrise,” 2018

After returning home to Düsseldorf, where he has lived since attending the renowned Kuntsakademie at the invitation of Scottish painter Peter Doig, Olson saw a news item about protesters in the nearby Hambach Forest. They had occupied the trees, building an array of tree houses and other temporary shelters to prevent a German energy company from stripping the old-growth forest for a coal mine. He got on a train the next morning, and walked past police barricades to meet the protesters. They let him photograph their community, which was festooned with political banners. At day's end, exhausted, he headed home thinking: “Wow, that was bizarre.”

But in blending the two experiences – in Italy and the Hambach Forest – he found a way forward. He sees himself as creating "a free space" that offers respite from the issues of our time – extremism, environmental disaster, the global refugee crisis and all the rest. He also drew on boyhood memories, remembering the sense of freedom he felt climbing trees. “Everybody likes tree houses to some extent," he says. "And, for me, I always liked them as a place of escape, as a place away from things." ■